Contemporary Front Yard Design

Contemporary front yard design is more subservient to home architecture than other forms of landscaping. Contemporary homes emphasize are often very abstract in design and suggest a stripping down of reality to its most basic geometric and linear components. Front yards around such a house must reflect these patterns of form and movement in order to support the attitude on Mentalism characteristic of all contemporary design and art.

Contemporary front yard design does not concern itself much with the beauty of Nature and outdoor structures. In contemporary front yard landscaping, all elements, including organic ones, must support the proportions and aesthetics of the home. Nature is more of a backdrop to the design build of human engineering and living space. This deliberate emphasizes Man’s unique relationship to Nature as someone who can shape the environment with conceptual forms that have no direct correlation to concrete patterns in Nature. This is why we often see contemporary art take a basic geometric shape, such as a quadrilateral, deliberately distort its dimensions, and then combine it with one or more forms to extend geometry into multi-dimensional space.

The intention in contemporary home architecture is to project such a mindset that is highly individual to the homeowner. Eclecticism is almost mandatory for this type of design build to be successful. Many owners of these homes work in the architectural, design, or fine arts community themselves. Their houses are expressions of both lifestyle and profession. This leaves little room, in most instances, for an exploration of the beauty of Nature as a realm to be enjoyed in its own right. Natural elements that are useful to humanity are reshaped into new forms that reflect aspects of human thought and unconscious forces of emotions. Front yard design in front of such a house will often lack the typical emphasis on foliage we seen in traditional landscapes. Instead functions like an organic frame for an obviously human form that centers the landscape on a sense of evolutionary preeminence.

In this sense, vegetation is completely subservient to human design and often only exists in contemporary front yards as supportive elements for the home, outdoor decorative sculpture, exterior buildings, and modernesque hardscapes, seating areas, and pathways. Gravel, concrete, and rock tend to overshadow even the presence of trees in these landscapes, with gardens, hedges, and special plantings being used only establish linear direction or build perimeters around areas of interest, entertainment, or decoration.

Gardens in contemporary front yards are very minimalist in comparison typical garden design styles. This is not to say that tradition is completely abandoned when we install a garden in front of a contemporary home. However, the traditional styles that emphasize natural beauty must be significantly altered or combined into new patterns in much the same way that home architecture uses the distortion and combination of basic geometry to create new pattern rooted in the abstract realm above and beyond concrete reality.